Legacy media was very prevalent in my life, and I remember it fondly as a child growing up. My family loves movies, and as a child I remember having a large collection of VHS tapes containing all of the movies I could ever ask for. Although VHS is basically obsolete, we still have an old tv upstairs in our house that contains a VHS player and all of our old tapes. I don’t think we have used the tv in years, making it weird to remember the time when that was all that we watched. My life changed when portable DVD players were invented, and I brought mine a long with me on every car ride, and on every trip with all of my favorite DVDs. Now, the portable DVD player has been replaced with laptops, and DVDs have been replaced with Netflix. Social media changes so fast that sometimes it’s hard to even remember a time when I didn’t possess an iPhone, or when I didn’t have Netflix to watch movies or tv shows on. It is crazy to think about how much can change in fifteen years, and makes me wonder if our current social medias will turn into legacy media in the next fifteen.
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It does seem as if there’s been an amazing speed-up in the cycles of media adoption and obsolescence over the past generation or so. I wonder whether we could view what Kevin Kelly calls the trend towards “dematerialization” in media (http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317372/the-inevitable-by-kevin-kelly/9780525428084/) as a kind of feedback loop that makes it ever easier to move on to the next media technology.